


o! what providence! what divine intelligence!

by cosmicpoet



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Catholicism, Character Study, Meta, Religion, pregame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-16
Updated: 2018-05-16
Packaged: 2019-05-07 16:38:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14675133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmicpoet/pseuds/cosmicpoet
Summary: Momota, raised religious, finds conflicting faith in the Bible and science.[Pregame character study]





	o! what providence! what divine intelligence!

“Fucking loser,” the chants of his fellow classmates should have stopped affecting him by now, but Momota still sinks lower into his seat. He’s so close to being finished – the end of the day is rolling around and then he’ll be free; or as free as a condemned man can be. Because each day tolls and heralds another, and more torment from his classmates lingers, inevitable, on the horizon.

No, what would his grandparents think? Complaining and moaning like he’s got the hardest life in the world; the guilt overtakes him as the final class ends and he packs up his books and leaves quickly, trying to be hidden and unseen.

Passing the Church on his walk home, he reads his rites in his head: _“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. My last confession was one month ago.”_

His hands, subconsciously clasped, ache with the longing for something more than the religion with which he was raised. He remembers the fascination of it all, of seeing his parents’ bodies in closed coffins, whilst he yearned to touch them and hug them for one last time; his grandfather’s hand thick on his shoulder, everyone in the chapel imagining the blood staining the car wreck that took his mother and father too young. How Momota had scorned God that night, cursing at the sky in the back garden, calling Him a cruel and wanton Deistic Hell-fire creature, until his grandmother had pulled him inside and punished him for taking the Lord’s name in vain.

Bitterness faded into becoming jaded, which faded into mute acceptance of hollow phrases. _God works in mysterious ways._ His grandmother would stroke his hair until he fell asleep, repeating this phrase like it would somehow stop his parents’ gaunt faces from appearing in his dreams, haunting him with promises that he, too, would fall with them. When their eyes burned in his mind, he tried to wake up and not think of Hell.

But no longer. His dreams no longer contain anything but blackness and the void of something gone from his life. He lands on this thought once the Church is long out of his sight, and tries to focus his mind onto merely walking home – a feat that requires so much of his lapsed attention that he fails to notice the regular school bullies advancing on him from behind.

“Momota,” he hears, and can’t possibly snap himself out of his enclosed mind before he feels the first hit. Encompassed by God, he feels pain as crucifixion, until he’s left on the floor. Blood on his lip, ah, his grandmother will be concerned – but no matter.

He sneaks silently into his house; having lived here for ten years after his parents died when he was eight, he knows the best passages up to his room that won’t call the attention of his grandmother, sat in her familiar chair, or his grandfather smoking a pipe in the conservatory.

Wiping the blood from his mouth in his bedroom, he sits at the edge of his bed and opens his Bible. Thinking it’ll please his grandmother if she finds him reading it, he hopes that it will distract her from the blooming cut on his lip – and still, he has to believe that God loves him. There’s nothing else in his life to rely on, but even the divine tastes bitter and leaves him with the tired-sting of ache in his eyes.

But these characters, these stories, they enamour him with all of the things he hasn’t yet done in his pathetic life. Falling into Jonah, he feels the whale envelop him; his hands clawing at the soft insides, gums and teeth progressing into squelching stomach – his feet, sinking, almost choking on the acidic air in the belly of the whale.

And then there’s Jonah, envisioned before Momota as a God, shining and warm. His hands are tied by Jonah’s own, encompassed by light as his whole being melts into the void of religion – he is not alone in the whale, he has Jonah’s God to guide him out of the sickening mouth; humanity _as_ vomit, stuck in the birth canal of reincarnation, he bleeds and breathes in the _medicine belladonna._

Handcuffed to the Lord, Momota worms through the belly of the whale as if overtaken by the spirit of a mariner, lost at sea and guided towards death in hopes of Heaven – Jonah, with his father’s face, holds his bloody hands and pulls until he becomes a non-entity, and Momota is left alone, holding his heart in his twice-broken fingertips.

“Momota,” he hears his grandmother saying, and the whale vanishes from his imagination. No longer overtaken by religion, he closes his Bible and looks at her old, worn face.

“What did you do to your lip, son?”

 _Son._ He knows she means well, but that word does not belong on her tongue – she lost her son, and he lost his father; the dichotomy of the two aches in his no-longer bloody hands, but he says nothing to contradict her. Instead, he sins, and lies.

“I fell,” he tells her.

“You should be more careful. It’s good to see you reading your Bible, though,” she ruffles his hair with her hand and sighs mournfully; he knows he looks like his father must have looked at age eighteen.

“But,” she continues, “you have to sleep. I didn’t hear you come in earlier.”

Glancing at the clock on his bedroom wall, Momota sees that hours have passed whilst he was stuck in his imagination. The bell is soon to toll for another day, and he bows his head as she leaves the room – she trusts that he will say his night-time prayers, and he will defy her and God in the same absent breath, lacking meaning and words alike.

Instead, he glances out of his bedroom window at the stars. Science, now, overcomes him, and he yearns to be with the calculated infinity of space; even in death, he longs to fly upwards and see the skies raining down upon his grandparents. To find Heaven amongst the universe, and once more meet his parents, is the only thing he can find true faith in.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I realised earlier that I've never actually seen all of the characters' FTEs, including Momota's, which honestly is a massive failure on my part. I think I saw Ouma's in a playthrough, a bit (or maybe all?) of Gonta's, maybe a few more (?) but honestly I'm not entirely sure why I haven't watched the FTEs of one of my favourite characters (Momota) - at least, I think I haven't seen them? Who knows, but I watched his FTEs with Saihara nevertheless. (And I watched Angie's. Oh I love her.)
> 
> And the story of the whale struck me. Having been raised Catholic, I found a good use for what I remember from school and my RS A-Level in college! So I wondered...what if Momota was raised religious, and had no friends, and found comfort in his _'imaginary friends'_ from the Bible? What if he thought that he could go to space to reach Heaven and see his parents again? 
> 
> So, this was born. And I truly hope you liked it. Please leave a comment if you did.
> 
> Title from 'Mariner's Revenge Song' by The Decemberists.


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